North Carolina's choice

LENOIR, N.C. — It would be tough to find another state where the political terrain has shifted as dramatically as it has here — from kindling hopes of a Democratic revival in the South just a few years ago, to becoming a conservative hotbed that banned gay marriage, tightened restrictions on abortion clinics and enacted a sweeping voter ID law.

In 2014, voters will have a chance to decide which of those two governing visions they prefer — Barack Obama’s Washington or one-party GOP rule in Raleigh ­ — in one of the most competitive, consequential Senate races in the country.

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It will be a choice between Kay Hagan, a rookie Democratic senator who voted for Obamacare and says, however haltingly, that she would do so again, and a conservative challenger — perhaps the figure who shepherded that wish list through the Legislature, Thom Tillis, or other rivals like Mark Harris or Greg Brannon who would go even further.

The race underscores the larger challenges facing both parties nationally as they head into the midterms. Democrats are struggling to survive in conservative states as they try to combat Obama’s growing unpopularity and antipathy to the health care law they helped enact. But Republicans are at risk of overreaching with a sharply conservative agenda at a time when their elected leaders are shifting further to the right and independent voters are angry at both parties.

Hagan, who triumphed against longtime Republican Elizabeth Dole to win the seat in 2008, is clearly banking on the hope that voters will punish her opponents for the actions of the GOP-led Legislature and their own hard-right views, whether it’s Tillis’s unapologetic agenda, Harris’s views that being gay is a lifestyle choice or Brannon’s calls to repeal everything from the minimum wage to virtually every gun law.

“This race is not about the president,” Hagan said in an interview, twice refusing to say whether she approves of Obama’s job performance.

But Tillis, a 53-year-old former IBM executive who has the strong backing of the GOP establishment but is by no means the prohibitive front-runner, is betting that Southern Democrats who once thrived here are dying breeds because of the liberal policies coming out of Washington. He is defiant about North Carolina’s hard-right turn, calling it a “reform agenda unlike any other state in the United States.”

“I think for the most part, what I see from the folks who are opposing our agenda is whining coming from losers,” he said in an interview in his Raleigh office. “They lost, they don’t like it, and they are going to try to do everything they can to, I think, cast doubt on things that I think are wise and that the average citizen when they know what we’re doing, I think, like it.”

With a slate of Republicans representing every corner of the party duking it out for the GOP nomination, Hagan and her party are hoping she’ll be spared despite the problems with Obamacare. Some 473,000 state residents have recently been told their health policies would be canceled after the president and Hagan pledged that people who liked their plans could keep them.

“She appears to be a pawn in the hands of the Obama administration,” Harris, a Baptist pastor from Charlotte, said in an interview at a diner in Kernersville, just west of Greensboro. “Any one of us on our worst day can beat Kay Hagan on her best day.”

Acknowledging the problems with Obamacare, Hagan said she’s working on “sensible fixes” and insisted that the outcome of the campaign wouldn’t turn exclusively on the Affordable Care Act. Instead, she pointed to her work on local issues such as contaminated water at Camp Lejeune, opposing tougher regulation of tobacco and providing tuition assistance for military service members.

“I think when you look at this race, what takes place in 2014, it’s about a contrast: It’s about what I’ve done in Washington versus what has taken place in the Republican-controlled Legislature,” Hagan told POLITICO. “They have really been focusing on fringe issues and on policies that work against the middle-class families.”

But when pressed about whether she would back the health care law if she had another chance, Hagan said: “Yeah, I would vote for it again. People have to realize that the cost of health care was getting out of reach for everybody.”

A survey this week by the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling showed Hagan continuing to take a big hit from the barrage of GOP attacks on TV and the bungled health care rollout, leaving her essentially tied with her GOP rivals. Continued problems with the implementation of the law could severely damage her chances next year, polling suggests.

It’s a far cry from 2008, when Hagan beat Republican incumbent Elizabeth Dole by 300,000 votes. (Obama, by contrast, won by 14,000 votes, becoming the first Democrat to carry the state since 1976, before losing the state by more than 92,000 votes in 2012.)

Democrats had high hopes after that election, believing the urban mix in Charlotte, Greensboro and the Research Triangle — along with the fact that about a quarter of the state’s voting population is African-American — would help turn the state into a Democratic-leaning battleground, like its neighbor to the north, Virginia. But Democrats have shed more voters here than the GOP — about 102,000, or 3 percent, since 2008 — and independents have grown about 4 percent in that period.

Throughout the country, Blue Dog Democrats in the House have been quashed during the Obama presidency, and Senate Democrats in Southern states beyond North Carolina — like Louisiana and Arkansas — are also at risk of losing next year and helping Republicans regain control of the Senate for the first time since 2006.

To survive, red-state Democrats aren’t promoting their own party’s agenda; they’re trying to make the other guy look worse than them. And Hagan isn’t just running against the GOP Legislature; she’s hoping history will repeat itself and Republicans will make themselves unelectable in a general election by catering to the fringes of their party in primaries.